Newcastle gets a fine new art gallery - with students and a professor thrown in

The mighty
Baltic crosses the Tyne from Gateshead on Good Friday to help launch a big new initiative off Bigg Market - a tonic for the area's many small indie shops and cafes.
Alan Sykes sips a flat white and admires

White, bright and raring to show off - one of the new gallery's studios which bring to mind Swinburne's ecstatic reference to Northumberland as 'joyous and bright'. Photograph: Mark Pinder

The Baltic will be programming the gallery, which is roughly the size of one of its four floors. As well as the top floor gallery, the building has 32 artists' studios and is the home for students from Northumbria University's art department. Baltic and Northumbria University are already in partnership through the BxNU Institute of Contemporary Art, which will be based at the new centre. The Baltic Professor, Christine Borland, will also be based in the building, and will be presenting a series of events for students and the general public from the venue later in the year. Meanwhile, the basement, houses a Stand comedy club and bist

Clean and neat; baltic39 from outside. Photograph: Mark Pinder
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The Baltic's director, Godfrey Worsdale, is pleased with the opportunities the new building will provide, saying: "The new gallery space will enable exhibiting artists from all over the world to bring their work and ideas into a context that is also home to academic practice-based research and over 30 professional artists' studios. With these component parts, it's hard to imagine how BALTIC 39 would not contribute something special to contemporary art in the UK, and particularly to the North East's burgeoning cultural community and creative economy."

Northumbria University's Vice Chancellor, Professor Andrew Wathey: said that the building will "allow significant growth of our postgraduate provision, as well as providing outstanding opportunities for arts students which will be difficult for any other UK university to match", adding that it will be "a pipeline where we can see students move into the profession."

The opening exhibition, called "Switch", is being curated by Phyllida Barlow. Barlow, who is Newcastle-born and was, until recently, Professor of Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, is exhibiting herself later this year at the New Museum in New York and at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. Of the thirteen artists taking part in "Switch", ten are in their 20s and 30s. The artists in the show include a mixture of painters, sound artists, installations artists, video artists and sculptors. According to the Baltic, "rather than simply locating a studio situation within the gallery, the exhibition aims to offer its participants, both artists and audience members, a common arena in which to share, test and understand the performative complexities of artistic production."

The gallery and building have been designed by the Viennese architectural practice Jabornegg & Palffy, whose previous work includes the new playhouse for the Oberammergau Passion and collaborating with Turner Prize-winning artist Rachel Whiteread on the Holocaust Memorial at the Judenplatz Museum in central Vienna. The architects have managed to retain the industrial "feel" of the original warehouses (and left largely intact the listed Edwardian High Bridge Street facade and entrance, originally designed by the prolific Newcastle architects Cackett & Burns Dick), while creating a spectacular bright and spacious top lit upper floor gallery, right in the middle of the city centre. The floors between the galleries and the artists' studios are joined by an impressive scissoring double staircase. The extra artists, students and visitors the gallery will bring to the area should help sustain the many small independent specialist boutiques, restaurants and shops in the area – there's not a corporate coffee shop or chain store in sight.

Baltic 39 (39 High Bridge Street, Newcastle) opens to the public at noon on Friday April 6th. It is a collaborations between the funders - Newcastle City Council and the Arts Council of England - and the venue's new operating partners, the Baltic and Northumbria University. The redevelopment of 39 High Bridge was funded by: the European Regional Development Fund, Arts Council England, Tyne and Wear Partnership via Single Programme Funding from ONE North East, the Northern Rock Foundation, the Sir James Knott Trust, the Barbour Trust and Newcastle City Council.